Reviews
A complex, nuanced portrait of English reading and writing during the Restoration and early eighteenth century... Ezell's deeply intelligent, challenging book will thus interest not only early modern specialists, but a more general readership concerned with issues of authorial identity and technological change.
Ezell's is a beautifully written and cogently argued study [and] an unqualified success.
Margaret Ezell's most recent book, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print, as her previous work, The Patriarch's Wife (1987) and Writing Women's Literary History (1993), is a revisionist literary history at its best.
Ezell eloquently challenges her fellow scholars' equation, conscious or unconscious, of authorship with publication.
In concise yet detailed fashion, Ezell shows us how commercial print culture eclipsed its vibrant manuscript counterpart.
Lucid and engaging in both style and argumentation.
Opens a new chapter in our understanding of writing and print in the Early Modern Era.
Ezell's work has become the gold standard for responsible, revisionary literary historicizing in the early modern period... Her work is groundbreaking in the most refreshing and dynamic sense.
This is an important contribution to our knowledge of writing and publishing practices of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As one has come to expect of Ezell, there is here a lot of new information dug out of sources that have been largely ignored, and there is a subtle redrawing of important outlines of literary history. And there is wit and style in the presentation. It is a splendid and important book.